![]() And indeed, early-trained musicians have better spatial and verbal memory, attention, mathematics skills, and perform better on other tasks involving the integration of multiple sensory and motor inputs. taking visual and auditory input (reading and listening to music, respectively) and coordinating it with motor output (playing the instrument) – the connections between these brain areas become stronger and more tightly connected, resulting in better sensorimotor integration. “The underlying science – that performing an activity that simultaneously engages both cerebral hemispheres can improve cognition – does appear to be true The best studied example of this is musicians who began training during early childhood and research has shown that the corpus callosum is larger in early-trained musicians compared to late-trained musicians and nonmusicians, especially if the training began before the age of 7 The hypothesis is that because musical training involves the coordination of multiple modalities – i.e. ![]() cross crawls) are then supposed to strengthen the connection between both sides of the brain, and improve academic performance as a result.ĭoes that actually work though? This “ Ask a neuroscientist” article from Stanford University thankfully addresses exactly this question. ![]() Brain Gym activities that cross the midline of the body (e.g. the left side having dominance over language. Cerebral dominance theory suggests a lot of things, but e ssentially comes down to the idea that it is normal for each side of the brain to have dominance over certain tasks, e.g. We all know that the brain is in two hemispheres, and they are joined by a collection of axons at the “midline”, called the corpus callosum:īroadly speaking, and according to Dr Robert Schmerling, “There is truth to the idea that some brain functions reside more on one side of the brain than the other”. So… we aren’t really equipped to go as deeply into neuroscience as we would need to to truly understand and explain cerebral dominance theory and, most importantly, the degree to which it is being appropriately applied in Brain Gym’s ideas. Hold on tight, it’s about to get all neuroscience-y.Īs you know, Katierose and I are teachers, with undergraduate degrees in things like business, psychology and music. If you don’t know what Brain Gym is, or you - like us - didn’t know that the academic world has some pretty strong opinions about it, this Newsnight segment from 2008 will be an excellent introduction (and it’s always entertaining to watch Jeremy Paxman do one of his oh-so-polite, British maulings): I had no idea, as a newly qualified teacher at the ripe old age of 24, that this program I had been told was going to help my students learn (just about everything) was being soundly debunked not just in academic papers from around the world, but even on BBC Newsnight. I trained as a teacher in 20, right at the height of Brain Gym’s popularity and, I only now realize, its controversy. We expected to learn something along the lines of “Brain Gym works sometimes, in some circumstances, for some things”. So, when we started looking into this, we both expected to find the type of results we have come to expect from education research: nuanced, neither black nor white, context-dependent. After all, Brain Gym was actively and officially endorsed by several national departments of education, including the US and Australia, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that it has value, and is based on evidence. ![]() This is because Brain Gym epitomizes the sort of topic we want to explore: things we have been taught to do, or told to do, or heard about but perhaps never really questioned. Brain Gym has been on the list of topics we wanted to explore since long before we were sure what this podcast would even be.
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